Category: Language Skills

By Jamell Andrews

Having a toddler can be frustrating. When they need something, they don’t yet have the vocabulary to express their needs in a way you understand as a mom. This can lead to a series of battles you may not even need to fight in the first place.

There are a couple of ways you can handle communication in a way they can understand, and it will make your life as a parent so much easier.

As new parents, you and your spouse are beside yourselves with joy over your new baby. Everything about your newborn seems magical and thrilling. But some characteristics that are perfectly normal in newborns may perhaps make you wonder if they’re something that’s peculiar to your baby, and if you need to do anything about it.

Let’s review a number of characteristics that are common among newborns, to help you decide whether your baby is in the normal range, or you should consult your pediatrician.

4-D Ultrasounds Show Fetuses of Mothers Who Smoke Make More Facial Movements

A study published in late March, 2015 showed that fetuses of mothers who smoke cigarettes during pregnancy had more facial and self-touching movements, such as opening their mouths, sucking their hands, grimacing, and touching their heads and eyes with their hands.

Back in 1995, a study by two child psychologists from the University of Kansas found that children whose parents were professionals were exposed to almost twice as many words as children in working class families; the latter in turn heard twice as many words as children in welfare families, the study noted.

In the ensuing years, much was made by governmental entities and developmental psychologists about exposing children, starting from birth, to a lot of words spoken by their parents and caregivers, which had been theorized by the study’s authors to be key to a child’s language acquisition and school success later on.

For many years, scientists have been trying to answer the question, Is a child’s intelligence inherited from its parents, or can the environment in which the child grows up determine intelligence? The old “nature vs. nurture” debate. A new study has found that “nature” may play the bigger part, when it comes to IQ.

A small group of universities from several countries, including three from the United States (Florida State University, University of Nebraska and Western Illinois University), collaborated on a study that found that genetics, and not parenting style, are linked to a child’s verbal intelligence: Verbal IQ is not the result of parental socialization, the study found.

With autism rates soaring at an alarming rate in the United States, medical researchers are looking for answers as to what causes this mysterious condition, both on an anatomical and physiologic level.

A study published online in late March, 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine is adding weight to scientific belief that autism may start in the fetal or even the embryonic stage of child development.

A recent study from Canada found that full-term babies who spent time in the neonatal intensive care unit had a considerably higher risk of developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD); most of the babies who became autistic also developed other health complications.

Researchers from McGill University in Montreal reviewed the charts of 180 full-term babies born between 1992 and 2007, who had been in the NICU at Montreal Children’s Hospital. All the babies had a gestational age of 37 weeks or longer.

Researchers have known for 30 years that babies start learning from hearing their mothers talk while still inside the womb … previous studies have shown that fetuses seem to recognize musical melodies.
But a new study co-authored by researchers in the United States and Sweden shows that babies start learning basic units of language — vowels — from about Read More